[intro music] Did you know it used to be illegal to be ugly, and that these laws helped lead to freak shows?

From the 1860s and into the 20th century, many cities across the U.S. had so-called "Ugly Laws," and if you were accused of violating them, then you could, in fact, be arrested for ugliness.

But these codes weren't intended to judge people based on attractiveness, like a 19th century Tinder, but actually a method of legal discrimination designed to keep people who were differently abled, injured, destitute, or any combination of these categories off of the streets and out of sight.

And although we think we've come a long way, the last case involving an Ugly Law was in 1974, only 16 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law.

Yikes.

So, how did this all arise?

Well, our first question needs to be: What are Ugly Laws and when were they first passed?

In her book, "The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public," Susan Schweik traces the earliest history of these laws in the U.S. to 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War.

In San Francisco, a former Union soldier named Martin Oates was arrested and then written about in the "San Francisco Morning Call," which reported him as: "A half demented fellow, named Martin Oates," who had "been stricken down with paralysis, leaving him a perfect wreck."

Schweik then notes that Oates was arrested and taken into custody while San Francisco awaited the completion of its almshouse, or a place designed to charitably take in the poor and destitute.

The law that was used to arrest Oates had been passed a few weeks earlier and called for people who were "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed" to be removed from the streets or to be otherwise kept from public view and prohibited from begging.

But, if you're not allowed to be seen outside, then how can you get a job?

And if you can't get a job, then how could you survive?

This was essentially the equivalent of a legal catch-22.

So, that brings us to our second question: Was there any way around this employment discrimination?

One of the weird loopholes of the Ugly Laws' employment restrictions was that a person could get around them if they had a disability and were also shown in public as part of a demonstration.

In her article, "Disability and the Circus," Professor Rachel Adams notes that while Ugly Laws prevented people with signs of visible difference from being seen in public, which limited the kinds of jobs they could hold, sideshows were often ways for people to make money to survive in the absence of a well-sustained and corruption-free social safety net.

But these shows were frequently dehumanizing for performers, and not every performer was treated well or fairly compensated in the 19th century or early 20th century.

So, we have a basic rundown on when these laws started to spring up, and how they affected people, but our next question is: Why were they getting passed?

Although the law made its first appearances in the U.S. in 1867, Schweik traces these instances all over the country, and each one seems to have language that is worse than the last.

And between 1880 and the 1910s, cities and states across the country passed similar laws, including Chicago, Portland, Denver, Lincoln, Omaha, Reno, Columbus, Ohio, and the state of Pennsylvania.

And New York and Los Angeles both attempted to pass Ugly Laws, even though they were ultimately unsuccessful.

The period when we see the spike in Ugly Laws and anti-beggary laws overlaps closely with the period in U.S. history known as the Progressive Era, which spanned from around 1890 through the 1920s.

And Ugly Laws arise as a result of local governments trying to force people into newly constructed almshouses and sanitariums.

The Progressive Era was marked by a push for greater social reform and anti-corruption laws to combat the down sides of the Industrial Revolution, including poor health, urban poverty, and rapid overpopulation in big cities.

Sounds almost too good to be true, right?

Well, that's because in a lot of ways, it was.

Even though many progressives wanted to fight government corruption, many of the almshouses and sanitariums that sprung up around this time were also rife with corruption of their own, and lot of Ugly Laws sprung up as an excuse to arrest people and then move them into almshouses, or to bar those who wouldn't or couldn't go to almshouses and sanitariums from going outside.

And though enactment of these laws appears to have waned around World War I, the last time an Ugly Law was used as a reason to arrest someone came in 1974 in Omaha, Nebraska, when a police officer wanted to arrest a homeless man and found the old law was still on the books.

Unsurprisingly, this didn't go down too well with the prosecutors who declined to throw the metaphorical book at someone for an outdated law.

But after decades of political pressure and organization by disability rights activists, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was signed into law by former president George H.W.

Bush.

Modeled after other laws that sought to guarantee the right to public space and access to equal opportunity to all citizens, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ADA's purpose is to ensure that citizens with disabilities can have equal employment opportunities, fair access to government services and programs, and that public spaces provide them with reasonable accommodations.

And, even after the ADA was passed in 1990, there's still valuable work being done by disability rights activists today to guarantee that all Americans continue to have increased access to civil rights and all forms of public space.

So, how does it all add up?

Well, although the Ugly Laws have a colloquial name that makes them sound more like fiction than fact to modern viewers, they existed not so long ago and were designed as a form of discrimination against a pretty wide range of people in the late 19th and early 20th century.

And although new Ugly Laws stopped getting written around World War I and were rarely enforced after that point, they remained on the books in U.S. cities like Omaha and Chicago until 1974 before they were officially repealed.

So, while this may seem like very far-back history, it's actually more recent than you'd think.

So, Ugly Laws-- kind of funny name, not so funny history.

So, what do you think?

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of.. [closing music]